Automatic accounting device



' March 3', 1953 E. JOEL, JR AL 2,630,270

AUTOMATIC ACCOUNTING DEVICE Filed June 24, 1949 l8 Sheets-Sheet 1 FIG. I

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AUTOMATIC ACCOUNTING DEVICE.

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A; E JOEL, JR m/wf/vrolqs. R O. R/PPERE ATTORNEY t This invention relates Patented Mar. 3, 1953 UNITEo STATE s PATENT OFFICE AnToMA'rIc ACCOUNTING DEVICE Amos E. Joel, Jr., New York, and Robert 0. Rippere, Massapequa, N. Y., assignors to Bell Tele- V phone Laboratories, Incorporated, New York, p N. Y., a corporation of New York Application June 24, 1949, Serial No. 101,088

through oneor more record tapes or equivalent a media, to calculate the charges to be made and to translate the collected and correlated data into aform required for printing. a

The present invention is exemplified herein in a plurality of circuit details of one of the electri V I customer use of given facilities-contains scattered items'of specific information, such as the initial entry, the answer or start time and the {disconnect or termination time foreach customer use 7 s Claims. (01. 2355-611) than one office, then as many of these perforators as there are offices will be used so'that a separate utes.

and other items of general information, suchas the general location of the using customers facilities, the date, the hours and the identity of the billingperiod. This tape-in a specific arrangement of an accounting system is employed as an accordance with abilling index which indicates the rate of charges, translates'this result intoa number of 'unit charges (message units in an automatic message accounting system) and distributes the calculatecl chargesalong with accompanying details to one or another, of a plurality of outgoing tapes. a a In a specificembodiment of the'invention the data from an incoming tape'linto, its calculator and registers andnineteen, perforators for distribu'ting the processed datato nineteen outgoing tapes, There will be ten of such perforators as signed to the recording of message unit charges.

'If the tape is from a marker group serving more bled items or specific information, "calculates therefrom elapsed time, modifies the result in' a computer is provided with al readerforentering outgoing tape for each ofiice wi l1 be prepared. If the marker group contains but a single office then the charges will be sorted on a decimal basis either in accordance with the. thousands digit of the called line number or 'in accordance with the units digit thereof. There will be six of such perforators assigned to the recording of detail calls, that iscalls, the details of whichwill be reported on the customers bills. Since the cen tral ,oflice tapes are recorded .by ,rounds and since" the longest round provided for will consist one; days, then six perforators are provided's'o 1 that the detail calls may be sorted by days.

There will be one perforator assigned to the re,- cording of irregular calls such as straddle calls or those occasional calls which exceed the capacity of the device such as those extending over a period of time greater than ninety-nine min- There will be one {perforator assigned to the recording of the details of message unit calls where these details are sought for monitorin or other purposes by the customer. The customers bill will nevertheless be rendered on the message unit basis so that a particular message unit call will be processed by the computer and two records produced therefrom, one in short form on one of the regular message unit tapes for billing purposes and another in longer form on;the message unitdetail record tape for supervisory-purposes. And lastly there will be one perforator assigned to record the line observed calls, that is, a record made of all calls originated on certain lines put under observation under routine or on account of customer complaints. Y

The first seventeen output tapes including the ten message unit tapes, the six detail call tapes and the irregular call tape will contain billing information whereas the last two, the message unit detail call and the line observed call tapes will contain reference information. The distribution of calls to these nineteen outgoing channels is a function of th computer and in'most cases is controlled by some index in the initial entry of each call, but may in other cases be controlled by extraordinary conditions derived or detected by the computer itself, as when the elapsed time calculated exceeds two digits (99 minutes). Thus, the computer translates, calculates, computes, sorts 'and otherwise rearranges the items of information found on an incoming tape'to form a plurality of outgoing tapes carrying the thus processed information in another form.

By way of illustration, a number of examples of assembled call information as they appear on the incoming tape and as they are transformed for perforation on one or another of the outgoing tapes are given with a short explanation of certain features of the transformation.

(1) A message unit call entered as:

which is a call made from oflice I} of the given marker group (identified in the tape identity entries) from calling line 5444, and extending from 31.7 minutes to 35.2 minutes- The billing index (3), we will assume will cause the calculation of 3.5 minutes of elapsed time to indicate 2 message units, so that the computer will form and cause, to be perforated on the number 5 perjorator (thousands digit of calling line number, assuming a single office in the givenmarker group) the following output line a emessase unltcellenteredas;

(3) emessa e unit 0.011 ent red. as

is. one-very similar to Example No. 1 except that it also includes an hour entry. The elapsed time is calculated as follows If this in combination with the billing index in-.-

d e tes 18 mess ge c l s en the. u p t. W l be, I 135444 (.4); A message unit call might appear as:

1 tical with Example No. 3 and the output line will be:

(5) Should a call appear as follows:

101657 20i021.l 201020 f 156 257 7 213057 005444 then the calculation of elapsed time would be as Z QHQW Assuming that this elapsed time will indicate 2'? nessaseu lits l -ou pu hQQQIQQfiA 6); If the, line 5444 of Example No. 1 were 1140. 2 obsercation, then the input to the computer would be as follows:

The entry index (the 13 digit of the first line of the initialentry-l is 4 instead of- 1 as in the first example, and two supplementary lines giving details of the called number are added. In this case the computer forms and causes to be perfo-. rated on thenumbezj-S perforator, as before, the output line:

Th s is lliteihiermation a d w ll eventually be the date, @9 11 the custom 's bill is made 1112-. Y

addition the computer forms and cause to be per-f9 ated en the, line observation tape the iQ l0wiue.--;

This is supervisory information and is not used n f rming bil s but goesto com a y lficials f r us pu p ses such as routin che o or ans e ng. cqulpl in s. e c he se s. ormed by a ransla r f o a as umed date. '1'. th;), 'hQ I .2 an ns time 31 The thirdand fpurth lines are copies of the last two lines of the assembled call and the last line has a r tqrd Q1 he messa e un t index (0 t e chargeable time (04'rounded off from 3.5) and the number of message unit s, charged (02).

("7) In Example No. 6 if the third line had been 233046 instead of 2430.46 then a message unit detail call is indicated, In such case the output line will be 125444, as before and'the five-line de- I tail information, record will be exactly the same 

